


Heart In My Hand

by actualkon, Piehead



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Extended Metaphors, Falling In Love, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Metaphors, Realizations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2017-10-25
Packaged: 2019-01-23 05:17:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12499616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actualkon/pseuds/actualkon, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Piehead/pseuds/Piehead
Summary: When Eric was little, his momma told him a story about hearts being in hands. When he's older, he understands what that means, and what it means to be in love.





	Heart In My Hand

**Author's Note:**

> Yay! Me and Max (@actualkon) wrote this together back in like August? July? One of those months and it sat, unedited, since then.
> 
> They had lyrics that inspired them and they are; “I guess that I'm just falling deeper into something I've never known, but the way that I'm feeling makes me realize that it can't be wrong” from 8th World Wonder by Kimberley Locke.

“When I was your age,” His momma told him when he was only about the height of her waist, “I wasn’t sure about boys. My momma told me they were bad and could steal your heart right outta your chest!” 

To accentuate her words, Suzanne Bittle lifted little Eric off his feet and swung him around. Eric giggled and clung tight to her, excited and playful. She sat down with him on her lap, glancing out of the open backdoor that let her see into the backyard where Richard was doing a bit of yardwork. He would glance up, every so often, to smile at his wife and child and wave.

“And then one day, I met a boy. And he wasn’t a bad boy, but he did exactly what my momma said he would,” Suzanne sighed, a smile on her face while she watched her husband. Eric looked up at her, then over at his father, and wrinkled his nose a bit.

“Is- is a boy gonna steal my heart?” he asked, sounding just the tiniest bit afraid. Suzanne startled a bit at the question, obviously caught off guard by the implied nature of it.

“Heavens no, Dicky!” She laughed a bit nervously. “What I’m telling you is that one day you’re gonna fall in love with a pretty girl, and you’re gonna have her heart in your hands.”

Little Eric tried to process the information. He thought about it and then decided that he didn’t really want to have anyone’s heart in his hands. It was a big responsibility, he was sure, to hold so much power. A heart kept a person alive, and if he had it, how were they supposed to live? His young mind conjured up all sorts of reasons why he couldn’t have someone’s heart in his hands while Suzanne just smiled at him.

Not long after their little conversation, Richard came into the house, sweaty and hunting for something cool to drink. Suzanne put Eric on his feet to pull out the pitcher of lemonade she had prepared, pouring her husband a tall glass. Eric received his own, smaller, cup of lemonade and drank while he watched his parents interact. His momma stepped into his daddy’s space and he leaned down to kiss her, and Eric was still young enough to think it gross, and stuck his tongue out at the action.

“I don’t wanna have a pretty girl’s heart,” he decided. Richard glanced over, a smile playing on his own lips, and looked back at Suzanne.

“You been tellin him that story about us?” he asked. Suzanne shrugged.

“He’s gonna fall in love one day, Richard.”

The words followed Eric through the entirety of his young life, through middle school and locked closets and frustration. It hits him again when he's sitting back on a chair, wondering if he'd really just been kissed or if in his sadness he'd conjured up a hallucination or fallen asleep or  _ something _ . It’s all too good to be true, and the emotions are too much, and Eric has never thought of falling in love like this.

The thing is, though, that no one falls in love quite the same. It’s a different for everyone. His momma fell in love and knew it in moments, but Eric isn’t his mother. He never thought  _ he _ would be the one falling nor did he think it would be as gradual as it was. It was slow; a process that he had never experienced before, and it was so new to him that he couldn’t recognize the signs.

By the time Eric even knew he was in love it was too late. His heart was stolen, pulled right from his chest and held closely in the hands of a man that was too many things at once. Not a bad boy, like his momma had said about his daddy, but snatched his heart anyway.

Maybe it was part self deprecation, or self preservation, but Bitty shook his head in disbelief. He must be a fool, throwing himself full force at Jack, before they were even dating (were they dating? Lord this boy made everything so complicated). 

How did Jack respond? With soft smiles and sweet kisses and lidded looks that could shame the devil, all between his mother’s glances and prying eyes. Having Jack in Madison with him was nothing short of amazing, but Bitty felt as if he was driving himself mad trying to discern if Jack was the one. It was stupid, Bitty knows, because it was only two months since they'd first kissed, and they'd just been in person for the first time since then too, but Bitty was a romantic, and maybe he  _ really _ wanted it to be Jack.

Maybe he was afraid it wasn’t.

It makes Bitty feel all kinds of guilty for thinking it,  not even mentioning the sickly feeling of him being right, so Bitty tries to avoid the thoughts all together and be happy around Jack. If he thinks about the days he's with Jack a little more than he usually does, and a little deeper, no one really knows. They’re his thoughts after all.

But when he’s alone his mind wanders, and Bitty knows it’s never good. His thoughts drift, from one idea to another, until he can’t stop thinking about what’s bothering him the most. Love could be such a fickle thing and sometimes Cupid hit the wrong targets. Maybe he wasn’t in love with Jack, and maybe this wasn’t real, and maybe they were going to wake up one day and realize they weren’t good for each other.

Whenever he thought too hard about it, though, always seemed to coincide with when Jack was in his presence. Because every time Bitty started thinking the worst, when his mind went into dark corners and grasped at horrible straws, Jack broke through the clouds like the first ray of sun after rain. He was the first breath of air after coming up from nearly drowning. He was the game winning goal when it looked like they were caught and wouldn’t win.

When Bitty felt like he couldn’t be in love, he took one look at Jack and realized, yes. He was. It wasn’t like what they pictured on TV, with people falling in love and describing it as such. It was so much more. It was waking up from a nightmare to someone who would hold you through the aftershock; it was little texts of good luck and conversations before games; it was a long drive at five in the morning to make one of the biggest decisions of their lives.

Sometimes Bitty remembered that his Momma had said his Daddy held her heart in his hands. He looked down at his own sometimes, covered in flour or scratched up, or in larger hands that held his like he held the entire world, and he remembered that he held the heart of someone too special for words in his own hands. And that same person held Bitty’s heart as well. He cradled it close and poured all of the love he had into it.

When Bitty didn’t think he was in love, he looked at his hands, and at Jack Zimmermann, and he remembered he was.

**Author's Note:**

> Big shoutout to Max, for having the idea in the first place. I finished it today because I found myself inspired by Thomas Sanders to write about love.
> 
> Comments? Questions? Concerns?


End file.
